


Hope Stronger Than Regret

by cricket_aria



Category: Baldur's Gate
Genre: Gen, Sisterly Love, Spellhold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 12:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8373028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cricket_aria/pseuds/cricket_aria
Summary: Imoen would never have been in this position if she'd just remained a plain old thief.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seika/gifts).



She should have been happy enough just being a thief.

It was all she’d wanted to be since she was four years old. Since the day that with a stealthy hand, a well-made distraction, and (some part of her had probably known even then) Winthrop’s affectionate blind eye she’d ransacked the inn’s cookie jar and smuggled a whole tray of sweetrolls into a sack besides only to surprised by enthusiastic applause from the closest window.

It was Imoen’s first time ever seeing her, the only other child in Candlekeep, her sister in all but blood (and even that, as it turned out now). A little bit older then her, even then all bruised knees and calloused fingers and hair that was always fight-tangled even with a training dummy as her only enemy, beaming as if Imoen had just pulled off the most impressive thing she’d ever seen. And Imoen had wanted to do it a million more times, to shove her fingers into every place they shouldn’t be and tease their treasures out of them, just to earn a million more smiles like in exchange for her cleverness.

Even in that first instant, without a word passing between them, Imoen had loved her, had wanted to do whatever she could to please her.

(“There was, of course, a draw,” Irenicus would drone in his flat and hateful voice when he ripped her memories out of her with pain and potions and digging, draining words, well before he tore anything from her with magic. “Bhaal’s blood calls out to itself, seeking to rejoin. In your youth you thought it a connection, in time as its power grew stronger--in her if not in you, weak thing that you are--it would cease being content to be stretched between two bodies however close they remain. You should be grateful that I have brought you here, child. She would have killed you, in time, when that draw became too great.”

He could have done nothing else to her and she would hated him for those words alone. For trying to taint the most important thing in her life, to turn into something dirty, something built by Bhaal.)

She’d never wanted to be anything else, never even considered it, not until their first journey up the Sword Coast. Not until the first time she was left behind, left to wait and worry in the Friendly Arm Inn while Khalid, poor Khalid, did his best to cheer her up. Not until Imoen watched over the weeks of their journey who her sister took and who she left behind whenever she stopped to shuffle up the group she dragged along to slice her way through everyone who tried to stop her, and realized that the one person she kept with her the most wasn’t Imoen. It wasn’t even Jaheira or Khalid, the ones whose care Gorion had left her in.

Even though her sister was _so_ good, the goodest person Imoen had ever met, even though in the entire time Imoen had known she she’d never seen her leave a kitten unsaved or an errand unrun or a wrong unrighted, the person she never let far from her side was _that wizard._ Edwin with his muttered threats and wicked ambitions, Edwin who no one in their right mind would ever dare to trust.

All Imoen had ever wanted was to be by her side, to make her happy and, once they were old enough to start finding their paths, to be useful to her. If magic was what she needed, needed so badly that she’d keep someone by her side that she should never have given a second of her time just because he was the strongest of the magic users that she’d met, then Imoen would give her magic. She’d trade in her lockpicks for a grimore if that was what it took, at least until she’d learned enough that she felt comfortable with both.

She’d made the greatest mistake in her life.

And because of it, because she couldn’t stand to be left behind, she was trapped in the hands of a man so evil he made Edwin look like a humanitarian. She was having every part of herself, everything that made her her, ripped away bit by bit.

Everything except the most important thing of all, the one thing Imoen refused to believe he'd ever be able to touch. She loved her sister, she loved her sister and _her sister loved her_ and would never, ever, leave her. Irenicus might think that she was just playing into his hands, but he had forgotten anything he'd ever known about loving a sister. Just the fact that he thought something as pathetic as the little traces of Bhaal within her could be to blame for the great big gobs of adoration she held towards her proved that. Imoen had watched her sister slaughter her way through hordes of enemies for a father who she'd lost.

Imoen could hardly even imagine how much further she'd go for a sister who she could still save. No matter what she had to suffer through to make it to that point, she _knew_ she was going to walk out of Spellhold in the end.

She could have just been a thief. She could have been happy all her life with only that, even if it meant sitting around alone from time to time. It wasn’t like she was so needy that she couldn’t stand a little lonliness.

But someday, someday that had to be coming soon, her sister would be coming. When that time came she would still need the force of magic by her side.

Imoen would be much more careful never to be pulled away from it again.


End file.
